The present invention relates to voice recognition and more particularly to providing feedback based on recognizable voice characteristics extracted during a conversation.
Although the first monograph on expression of emotions in animals and humans was written by Charles Darwin in the last century and psychologists have gradually cumulated knowledge in the field of emotion detection and voice recognition, it has attracted a new wave of interest recently by both psychologists and artificial intelligence specialists. There are several reasons for this renewed interest: technological progress in recording, storing and processing audio and visual information; the development of non-intrusive sensors; the advent of wearable computers; and the urge to enrich human-computer interface from point-and-click to sense-and-feel. Further, a new field of research in AI known as affective computing has recently been identified.
As to research on recognizing emotions in speech, on one hand, psychologists have done many experiments and suggested theories. On the other hand, AI researchers made contributions in the following areas: emotional speech synthesis, recognition of emotions and using agents for decoding and expressing emotions. Similar progress has been made with voice recognition.
In spite of the research on recognizing emotions in speech, the art has been devoid of methods and apparatuses that utilize emotion recognition and voice recognition for business purposes.
A system, method and article of manufacture are provided for monitoring emotions in voice signals and providing feedback thereon. First, a voice signal is received representative of a component of a conversation between at least two subjects. Thereafter, an emotion associated with the voice signal is determined. Feedback then provided to a third party based on the determined emotion.
In one aspect of the present invention, the conversation may be carried out over a telecommunications network. Further, one of the subjects may be a customer while another one of the subjects may be an employee, and the third party may be a manager. Optionally, the employee may be employed by a call center.
In yet another aspect of the present invention, the feedback may be provided only if the emotion is determined to be a negative emotion. Such negative emotion may be anger, sadness, and/or fear. Further, the emotion may be determined by extracting a feature from the voice signal for analysis purposes.